About

Veteran • Artist • Writer • Photo-er • Over-thinker

I haven’t been everywhere yet but it’s on my to-do list. I have visited a fair bit of the world though, witnessing it all with the skepticism of a native New Yorker. My first years in the military reshaped me. The New Yorker in me got pummeled. Labeled fast-talking and ‘arrogant’ (I’ve concluded it was because of my accent), I wasn’t exactly well received by people who hadn’t grown up in cities. I was young. I learned. Traveled. Relearned. That became my habit. When complacency sets in, I know it’s time to move again. Along the way, I learned first the camera, and later the pen. Today I carry both and they war with each other for my attention.

While stationed at Eielson Air Force Base, I faced skepticism about my solo backcountry hiking in Alaska. “No picture, no proof.” Photography solved that problem. Since then that documenting has bloomed, wintered, and bloomed again. I now define my photography as having two distinct veins: Comfortable Isolation and the Personification of Nature. I have been mastering skills but also crafting my art as cameraman into a vision that is personal and wholly my own.

Comfortable Isolation in photographs is a product of growing up as an outsider and growing into being a loner. But it is also a perception/representation of an important component of growth that society seemingly allows to slip away. Our character grows as the conversations we have with ourselves develops. The inner dialog where we battle our demons and mold our beliefs occurs in our moments of solitude. We have fewer and fewer moments of solitude as the outside world both crashes through the barriers of our attention and is invited into our minds as a deliberate distraction from our inner monolog. I’ve been creating these solitary places/spaces in my photographs to represent this dynamic. Pieces like Edge of Solace, Solitude (and the rest of the Lonely Boat Series), Adrift (below), and others.

Personification

Finding Nature in my photographs is largely due to luck combined with the opportunity to be out there and ready for it. I am looking for signs of life in my photographs. In Dance, the crowded trees curve in dance-like positions while also maintaining that clear pathway for your thoughts. Like a labyrinth, it’s a moving meditation at home in a live forest. It took me quite awhile to find a forest that was both moving and clear. There are also images like Guardian with its multitude of faces (15) and its story of protection on the North Shore of Hawaii. Her, (pictured below), with its woman beneath the red waves, as if they were bed sheets. Pacing the Sun, with its bird in the waves. Wild Horses, with the stallion before the stars.

Beyond...

As I mentioned in the introduction, this aesthetic is evolving into an entirely new image. Below is the image, The Mountain. She is the first of my Human Landscapes or Bodyscapes. Again, it is about finding nature personified but in a more deliberate way. I have plans to use both male and female models in more aesthetic, artistic, painterly, and visually pleasing ways than what I have seen in the past.